The Bundeshaus in Bern, Lucerne’s Kapellbrücke bridge, Geneva’s Jet d’eau: Switzerland has a whole host of landmarks. And yet there’s one of them to which we never give a second thought, even though we see it every day: the Swiss railway station clock.
Nicolaus Copernicus is considered one of the founders of modern astronomy. His heliocentric planetary model unleashed an outcry in Reformation circles, especially in Switzerland.
Discovered in a museum storeroom, a magnificent portrait of a horseman proves to be witness to a life straight out of an adventure novel: Fribourg mercenary leader Franz Peter König’s wild gallop through the Thirty Years’ War.
Birch bark pitch is the oldest all-purpose adhesive in history. Ötzi used birch pitch to affix his arrowheads to the shafts of the arrows; other prehistoric peoples glued broken pottery with birch pitch, or sealed canoes with it. Recently, science has also solved the mystery of how it was produced.
In 1924, the Principality of Liechtenstein turned its back on the Austrian krone and adopted Switzerland’s national currency, somewhat clandestinely at first and then officially.
‘A sturdy, high-performance assistant for all four types of calculation, right there in your pocket’, promised the sales brochure. The world’s smallest handheld mechanical calculator was made in Liechtenstein.
At the Marian shrine of Oberbüren (Canton of Bern), the medieval Catholic Church offered some very special services: children who were stillborn or had died at birth were briefly brought back to life so that they could be baptised and then properly buried.
Salt is much more than just a seasoning. Salt is essential to life, and therefore a valuable commodity. For centuries Switzerland was dependent on salt imports. In 1836, a determined German drilling specialist and ‘salinist’ changed that for good.
